Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb in 1968, and since then, the world population has gone up two-and-a-half times. Ehrlich has now died, and I’ve read the obituaries in Nature and the New York Times. Both say he was misguided. “His overemphasis on population growth,” writes Nature, “has not proved to be justified.”

It seems that Ehrlich’s sky-is-falling rhetoric turned many against him, and I imagine I would have reacted the same way if I had known him. Specifically, his predictions of imminent mass starvation and exhaustion of resources have not come to pass.

Global warming, on the other hand, is certainly coming to pass, and having 8 rather than 3 billion people on the planet is one of the reasons. This makes me wonder. Suppose Ehrlich had focused on climate instead of resources. Would today’s obituaries still be speaking of his overemphasis on population growth?

[3 May 2026]